Your ideal life coach marketing plan

PublishedAugust 15, 2011

Why do you need a life coach marketing plan for your practice?

First reason. The thinking you will need to do, and the necessary research and testing will give you substantial knowledge about your market. The plan’s creation need not take long. For example, read the article “a simple coach marketing strategy” or “Niche marketing for coaches”, these show you ways that you can have this information in as little as 48 hours and practically by the end of a week. Please make sure you develop tour life coach marketing plan.

Second reason for having a life coach marketing plan. You may well have had an experience similar to me. You wake up one morning and think “I need some more clients this week”. At that moment your brain goes blank, reset to factory fresh! This is the point you reach for your plan, because it’s going to tell you what to do.

It takes focus and effort to write the plan, and design the tasks. Now I don’t know about you, but Monday morning having to start thinking again can be a little challenging. So doing the thinking once means that you don’t need to do it now, you just get on and do the work. This saves you time, effort and without doubt goes a long way to removing that procrastination we have.

What I suggest your plan consists off

Note: before looking at the details. You should aim for fewer than two sides of paper. One page is better. Brevity helps. There are several reasons for having a short document. For example, it is quick to read. This short text can stay in your mind so you can focus on the entire marketing plan. Too long and there is the danger of distraction by those endless little details and spinning off down the wrong road.

The contents of your life coach marketing plan

First, clearly state who you are serving. It could be accountants, or perhaps sales managers in your local city area. No need for heaps of details. For example, I help coaches and therapists.

Second, the main issues you can help this group with. What benefits they can expect. You should aim for between 3 and 10 problems. Make sure you put these issues down in the language your target audience is likely to use. Include a description of the solution you provide to each of these problems. When you have them written down you can later quickly cut and paste to any other documents you create.

Having to hand well crafted sentences that say what you want will greatly improve all your written communications. Taking time to write this now will save huge amounts of time later. A simple example is getting enquiries; you can just copy the prewritten text in your response.

As an example of a problem/solution, I help coaches and therapists find the clients who are willing to pay them what they are worth.

Note: if you cannot write this section then you don’t yet know your target market, or you cannot help them with their main issues. Choose the group you know you can help.

Third, where you mainly are going to find your target audience. For example, if social sites, be specific about the major groups potential clients are likely to be in. If from search engines, be clear what the keywords will be. It could be offline such as annual conferences, local chapter meetings of the group you help. It could be print publications. If you need to have access to information such as contact details for journals and publishing dates make sure you put them in the plan.

Note: if you do not have an easy way of contacting your ideal group, then they are not a good market for you. Find another group you can more easily get in contact with.

Fourth, how will you contact your market? Here is where you give details about the tactics you’re going to use. An example could be taking part in a particular collection of groups on LinkedIn. Another example would be placing adverts in a suitable trade journal.

Eventually you’re going to need about six different ways of contacting your market. You will build them one at a time; don’t fall into the trap of feeling you’ve got to develop six from the start. Be careful not to end up with more work to do than you can handle. Don’t put yourself in the position where nothing progresses fast enough to give you the results you’re looking for.

Choose your work load so that you most quickly get promotional methods working before starting new ones.

Fifth, the major marketing tasks. This section contains the one-off big items such as building a website, or even writing a book.

Put them in priority order, for example, which are likely to bring new business quickly? Which when done could you use in several different ways?

Make brief notes why you’re putting them in this order. It’s far too easy to come back in two months and forget the thinking you put in when you created this plan. Save your brain having to work too hard!

Sixth are the regular tasks. Any marketing plan needs regular tasks. For example, writing and publishing an article on your website. Some tasks are going to be daily, some weekly, some monthly and some less often.

Again, put these tasks in priority order. For example, responding to enquiries is high priority, after all these are people who are getting closer to hiring you.

How to best use your coach marketing plan

Remember the plan is working for you; you are not working for the plan. If it becomes clear the plan isn’t right then you can change the plan. Make sure though you’re not changing the plan every day and not doing the work. Bear in mind that some actions take a long time to show results. For example, consider getting yourself to number one in Google. This can take three perhaps up to 6 months, even for low competition keywords (the search phrases people type into the search engines).

How to work on routine tasks. Some people like to book slots in their schedule and work accordingly; this works great for many people. I’m in the other group. I like to have a task list and work on the next one I know I’m in the right mindset to do. Choose which approach works for you.

For us coaches routine is something we can get uncomfortable with. We like many options, new shiny things, and new ideas. Remember marketing strategies take time to root in and bear fruit. So the biggest challenge you may face is not finding good business ideas, nor putting together a plan, nor knowing what to do. It’s likely to be sticking to the plan for long enough to give it a chance to work for you.

A significant problem many coaches have with marketing is quitting too early with any particular technique. They don’t get the results quick enough so they think it’s not working for them. Partially the problem is those wonderful sales headlines that promise you avalanches of clients in the next 15 minutes. We want to believe them, and it makes us believe that what we are doing is inadequate. The brutal truth is marketing takes time and effort; there aren’t any real short cuts to doing the work.

Have fun putting your plan together, and do let me know how it is going.